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retrocanvas · 2 years
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How to Maximize Your SEO Return on Investment 
Many small-business owners struggle with deciding whether — or how much — to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). Read the few strategies here
Many small-business owners struggle with deciding whether — or how much — to invest in search engine optimization (SEO). It’s difficult to accurately calculate the return on your SEO investment, and few businesses even try. There are a few strategies that anyone can use to improve their SEO without requiring a large initial investment. How do you determine whether any of your business decisions…
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Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands
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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!
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Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation
It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan
Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.
Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.
That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.
Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:
https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528
(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against
Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:
https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/
In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:
https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/
One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.
A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."
Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:
https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg
The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.
Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.
This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:
https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936
There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:
https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/
The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:
https://moneygroup.pr/
Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:
https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/
All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:
https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/
As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.
A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).
Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:
https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg
Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.
Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.
As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:
https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425
As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.
All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.
Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/
This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/
We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html
Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi
Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:
https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150
But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.
It cheated.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse
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Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
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techjouney111 · 3 months
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Simplifying Website Design and Development: Your Ultimate Guide
Simplifying Website Design and Development: Your Ultimate Guide
In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is essential for businesses of all sizes. A well-designed and developed website not only enhances your brand image but also serves as a powerful marketing tool to attract and engage customers. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore everything you need to know about website design and development, including services, companies, and agencies in the USA and Canada.
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Understanding Website Design and Development
Website design and development encompass the process of creating and building a website from scratch or redesigning an existing one. It involves various elements such as layout design, user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design, coding, content creation, and optimization for search engines.
Website Design and Development Services
Professional website design and development services cater to the diverse needs of businesses seeking to establish or enhance their online presence. These services typically include:
Custom Website Design: Tailored design solutions to reflect your brand identity and meet specific business objectives.
Responsive Web Development: Building websites that adapt seamlessly to different devices and screen sizes for optimal user experience.
E-commerce Development: Creating online stores with secure payment gateways, product catalogs, and shopping cart functionality.
Content Management Systems (CMS): Integration of user-friendly CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal for easy website management.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Implementing strategies to improve website visibility and rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Website Maintenance and Support: Ongoing support, updates, and maintenance services to ensure website performance and security.
Website Design and Development Companies and Agencies
In the USA and Canada, numerous companies and agencies specialize in website design and development. These firms offer expertise in creating high-quality websites tailored to clients' unique needs and preferences. Some key characteristics to look for in a reputable website design and development company or agency include:
Experience and Expertise: Choose a company with a proven track record of delivering successful projects across various industries.
Portfolio: Review their portfolio of past work to gauge the quality and diversity of their designs and developments.
Client Reviews and Testimonials: Read reviews and testimonials from previous clients to assess their satisfaction and experiences.
Communication and Collaboration: Look for a company that emphasizes clear communication and collaboration throughout the project lifecycle.
Affordability and Value: Consider companies that offer competitive pricing without compromising on quality and value-added services.
Website Design and Development Companies in the USA and Canada
In the USA, reputable website design and development companies include:
ABC Web Solutions: A leading web development firm specializing in custom website design, e-commerce solutions, and digital marketing services.
XYZ Creative Agency: Known for innovative web design, responsive development, and SEO optimization strategies tailored to clients' specific needs.
123 Digital Studio: Providing comprehensive website design and development services, including UI/UX design, CMS integration, and ongoing support.
In Canada, notable website design and development companies include:
Maple Leaf Web Design: Offering professional website design, e-commerce development, and SEO services for businesses across Canada.
Great White North Digital: Specializing in responsive web design, custom development, and online marketing solutions to help Canadian businesses thrive online.
True North Web Solutions: A full-service web agency providing creative design, robust development, and strategic digital solutions tailored to clients' goals.
Conclusion
Investing in professional website design and development is crucial for businesses looking to establish a strong online presence and attract customers. By understanding the services offered and choosing reputable companies or agencies, you can create a visually appealing, functional, and user-friendly website that drives business growth and success.
Whether you're based in the USA or Canada, there are numerous options available to help you achieve your website design and development goals. Take the time to research, compare, and select the right partner to bring your vision to life and propel your business forward in the digital landscape.
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agenciaefesios · 1 month
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Novas Atualizações nas Pesquisas Google em 2024
Todos os anos o Google realiza mudanças importantes em seu algoritmo para uma melhor experiência do usuário. Entenda melhor as mudanças realizadas em 2023 que terão impacto em 2024.
Entendendo o Algoritmo Google
Conheça as novas atualizações nas pesquisas Google em 2024 e as ações necessárias para se adequar ao algoritmo da plataforma.
Compreender o algoritmo do Google é fundamental para qualquer pessoa que tenha um negócio ou blogs e deseja mais visibilidade na internet. O Google, sendo o mecanismo de busca predominante, emprega um algoritmo complexo para determinar a relevância e classificação das páginas da web.
Basicamente, o algoritmo do Google opera por meio de um processo de duas etapas: rastreamento e indexação. Os bots do Google, conhecidos como spiders, rastreiam a web para descobrir e analisar conteúdo. Depois de rastreadas, as informações são indexadas, criando um enorme banco de dados que forma a base para os resultados da pesquisa. Este sistema eficiente permite ao Google organizar e recuperar informações rapidamente quando os usuários iniciam uma pesquisa.
Atualizações do Algoritmo
O Google atualiza regularmente seu algoritmo para melhorar os resultados da pesquisa e combater táticas manipulativas. Essas atualizações, geralmente com nomes de animais como Panda, Pinguim e etc, visam refinar a experiência de pesquisa. Manter-se informado sobre essas atualizações é crucial para que proprietários de sites e profissionais de marketing digital adaptem suas estratégias e mantenham ou melhorem suas classificações.
Este post completo e mais dicas sobre marketing digital e anuncios Google, no Blog da Efésios
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emtechredijitalajans · 6 months
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Emtechre Digital Agency: Your Gateway to Exceptional Web Design
Emtechre Digital Agency: Your Gateway to Exceptional Web Design Today, for your company’s online success, a professionally designed website can make a difference. We at Emtechre Digital Agency are devoted to designing websites that are visually stunning and have high functionality that enthrall the audience and yield tangible results.
We have a team of talented designers and developers who are capable of making your online presence a powerful tool for growth. After all, we realize that your site means more than just some web pages; it represents your brand as well as a vital point of contact with potential customers.
Our approach to web design is based on providing outstanding user experience. The website must be intuitive, visually beautiful and easy to navigate. Consequently, by implementing latest industry standards and best practices, we develop seamless and engaging user interfaces which will impress the visitors in an enduring way.
Emechre Digital Agency is proud to offer you customized solutions for your needs. We know every business has different goals and needs. Our team will cooperate with you in designing and deploying a solution that suits your vision whether it is a sleek informative website, a robust e-commerce platform or dynamic web application.
We are naturally built to stay ahead of the rest. We keep up with new technologies and trends so that your website remains modern, functional, and future-proof. From mobile first design that optimizes well for different devices, to incorporating interactive elements that enhance user engagement, we infuse innovation into every aspect of our web design process. Our partnership with clients is based on integrity and openness. We value your contributions and opinions, believing that a successful website is a result of teamwork. All through the web designing journey, we keep you posted by giving updates frequently and seeking for your feedback so as the final product will be beyond your expectations.
In conclusion, Emtechre Digital Agency is your go-to partner for web design excellence. Our team of experts combines artistic creativity with technical prowess to create stunningly beautiful websites that move your business forward. Employing an approach that is aimed at addressing the users’ needs, offering tailor made solutions as well as being committed to technological change leadership; we will ensure you make an impressive online footprint. Trust Emtechre Digital Agency to transform your website into a powerful asset that sets you apart from the competition and propels your business to new heights.
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shawonmarketing · 6 months
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Hiiiiiiiiiiiiii !
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revampingit · 2 days
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RevampingIT -  Your Trusted Partner in Digital Marketing
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today's digital age, having a strong online presence is essential for businesses to thrive and succeed. At RevampingIT, we understand the importance of digital marketing in reaching and engaging with your target audience effectively. As a leading digital marketing company in Delhi, we are committed to helping businesses revamp their online presence and achieve their marketing goals. Understanding Your Business Needs
RevampingIT, we believe that every business is unique, and therefore, requires a tailored digital marketing strategy to succeed. Our team takes the time to understand your business, its goals, target audience, and industry landscape to develop a customized digital marketing plan that delivers results.
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In today's social media-driven world, engaging with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn is essential for building brand awareness and driving conversions. Our social media marketing services help you connect with your target audience, foster meaningful relationships, and achieve your business goals.
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PPC advertising offers a cost-effective way to reach your target audience and drive immediate results. Our PPC specialists create and manage targeted campaigns across platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads, maximizing your ROI and ensuring that your ad budget is spent wisely.
Content Marketing
Compelling content is at the heart of any successful digital marketing strategy. Our content marketing services focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that resonates with your audience and drives engagement. From blog posts and articles to videos and infographics, we help you deliver valuable content that attracts and retains customers.
Measurable Results
AtRevampingIT, we believe in transparency and accountability. We provide regular reports and analytics to track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns and measure their effectiveness. By analyzing key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and engagement levels, we continuously optimize your strategy for maximum results.
Get Started Today
If you're ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, partner with RevampingIT. Our team of experts is dedicated to helping you achieve your business goals and drive growth through innovative digital marketing solutions. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and learn more about how we can help your business succeed online.
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anandparikh · 5 days
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famousfungarden · 13 days
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We provide digital marketing services
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hidigital · 1 month
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"Mastering Web Development: Key Strategies for Effective Website Design"
"Discover top-notch tips and tricks for web development to enhance your website's design and functionality. From responsive layouts to intuitive navigation, learn how to craft user-friendly experiences that captivate your audience. Dive into the world of web development and elevate your online presence today!"
#webdevelopment #webdesign #userexperience #responsivedesign #websitedesign #webtips #webdevelopmenttips #digitalpresence"
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lunaseo23 · 1 month
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𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 & 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐭𝐬?
𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐫 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐰𝐞𝐛𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐬, 𝐬𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐥. 𝐁𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡, 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠, 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐞𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬, 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥-𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐬.
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srabonhjp · 1 month
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I am a professional freelancer🖥️
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Google makes millions on paid abortion disinformation
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Google’s search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google assures us that they’re working on it, though the most visible effort is replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a confident habitual liar chatbot:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences at enormous scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing Jathan Sadowski’s “Habsburg AI”:
https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194
But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass every day? You won’t find them — but you will find a fake locksmith service that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come back to rob you):
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html
Google is clearly losing the fraud/spam wars, which is pretty awful, given that they have spent billions to put every other search engine out of business. They spend $45b every year to secure exclusivity deals that prevent people from discovering or using rivals — that’s like buying a whole Twitter every year, just so they don’t have to compete:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-a-google-antitrust-case-could/
But there’s an even worse form of fraudulent listing on Google, one they could do something about, but choose not to: ad-fraud. For all the money and energy thrown into “dark SEO” to trick Google into putting your shitty, scammy website at the top of the listings, there’s a much simpler method. All you need to do is pay Google — buy an ad, and your obviously fraudulent site will be right there, at the top of the search results.
There are so many top searches that go to fraud or malware sites. Tech support is a favorite. It’s not uncommon to search for tech support for Google products and be served a fake tech-support website where a scammer will try to trick you into installing a remote-access trojan and then steal everything you have, and/or take blackmail photos of you with your webcam:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-search-ads-infiltrated-again-by-tech-support-scams/
This is true even when Google has a trivial means of reliably detecting fraud. Take the restaurant monster-in-the-middle scam: a scammer clones the menu of a restaurant, marking up their prices by 15%, and then buys the top ad slot for searches for that restaurant. Search for the restaurant, click the top link, and land on a lookalike site. The scammer collects your order, bills your card, then places the same order, in your name, with the restaurant.
The thing is, Google runs these ads even for restaurants that are verified merchants — Google mails the restaurant a postcard with a unique number on it, and the restaurant owner keys that number in to verify that they are who they say they are. It would not be hard for Google to check whether an ad for a business matches one of its verified merchants, and, if so, whether the email address is a different one from the verified one on file. If so, Google could just email the verified address with a “Please confirm that you’re trying to buy an ad for a website other than the one we have on file” message:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
Google doesn’t do this. Instead, they accept — and make a fortune from — paid disinformation, across every category.
But not all categories of paid disinformation are equally bad: it’s one thing to pay a 15% surcharge on a takeout meal, but there’s a whole universe of paid medical disinformation that Google knows about and has an official policy of tolerating.
This paid medical disinformation comes from “crisis pregnancy centers”: these are fake abortion clinics that raise huge sums from religious fanatics to buy ads that show up for people seeking information about procuring an abortion. If they are duped by one of these ads, they are directed to a Big Con-style storefront staffed by people who pretend that they perform abortions, but who bombard their marks with falsehoods about health complications.
These con artists try to trick their marks into consenting to sexual assault — a transvaginal ultrasound. This is a prelude to another fraud, in which the “sporadic electrical impulses” generated by an early fetal structure is a “heartbeat” (early fetuses do not have hearts, so they cannot produce heartbeats):
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/heartbeat-bills-called-fetal-heartbeat-six-weeks-pregnancy-rcna24435
If the victim still insists on getting an abortion, the fraudsters will use deceptive tactics to draw out the process until they run out the clock for a legal abortion, procuring a forced birth through deceit.
It is hard to imagine a less ethical course of conduct. Google’s policy of accepting “crisis pregnancy center” ads is the moral equivalent of taking money from fake oncologists who counsel people with cancer to forego chemotherapy in favor of juice-cleanses.
There is no ambiguity here: the purpose of a “crisis prengancy center” is to deceive people seeking abortions into thinking they are dealing with an abortion clinic, and then further deceive them into foregoing the abortion, by means of lies, sexually invasive and unnecessary medical procedures, and delaying tactics.
Now, a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that Google made $10m last year on ads from “crisis pregnancy centers”:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-made-millions-from-ads-for-fake-abortion-clinics/
Many of these “crisis pregnancy centers” are also registered 501(c)3 charities, which makes them eligible for Google’s ad grants, which provide free ads to nonprofits. Marketers who cater to “crisis pregnancy center” advertise that they can help their clients qualify for these grants. In 2019, Google was caught giving tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free ads to “crisis pregnancy centers”:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/12/google-advertising-abortion-obria
The keywords that “crisis pregnancy centers” bid up include “Planned Parenthood” — meaning that if actual Planned Parenthood clinics want to appear at the top of the search for “planned parenthood,” they have to outbid the fraudsters seeking to deceive Planned Parenthood patients.
Google has an official policy of requiring customers that pay for ads matching abortion-related search terms to label their ads to state whether or not they provide abortions, but the report documents failures to enforce this policy. The labels themselves are confusing: for example, abortion travel funds have to be labeled as “not providing abortions.”
Google isn’t afraid to ban whole categories of advertising: for example, Google has banned Plan C, a nonprofit that provides information about medication abortions. The company erroneously classes Plan C as an “unauthorized pharmacy.” But Google continues to offer paid disinformation on behalf of forced birth groups that claim there is such a thing as “abortion reversal” (there isn’t — but the “abortion reversal” drug cocktail is potentially lethal).
This is inexcusable, but it’s not unique — and it’s not even that profitable. $10m is a drop in the bucket for a company like Google. When you’re lighting $45b/year on fire just to prevent competition, $10m is chump change. A better way to understand Google’s relationship to paid disinformation can be found by studying Facebook’s own paid disinformation problem.
Facebook has a well-documented problem with paid political disinformation — unambiguous, illegal materials, like paid notices advising people to remember to vote on November 6th (when election day falls on November 5th). The company eventually promised to put political ads in a repository where they could be inspected by all parties to track its progress in blocking paid disinformation.
Facebook did a terrible job at this, with huge slices of its political ads never landing in its transparency portal. We know this because independent researchers at NYU’s engineering school built an independent, crowdsourced tracker called Ad Observer, which scraped all the ads volunteers saw and uploaded them to a portal called Ad Observatory.
Facebook viciously attacked the NYU project, falsely smearing it as a privacy risk (the plugin was open source and was independently audited by Mozilla researchers, who confirmed that it didn’t collect any personal information). When that didn’t work, they sent a stream of legal threats, claiming that NYU was trafficking in a “circumvention device” as defined by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a felony carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine — for a first offense.
Eventually, NYU folded the project. Facebook, meanwhile, has fired or reassigned most of the staff who work on political ad transparency:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program
What are we to make of this? Facebook claims that it doesn’t need or want political ad revenue, which are a drop in the bucket and cause all kinds of headaches. That’s likely true — but Facebook’s aversion to blocking political ads doesn’t extend to spending a lot of money to keep paid political disinfo off the platform.
The company could turn up the sensitivity on its blocking algorithm, which would generate more false positives, in which nonpolitical ads are misidentified and have to be reviewed by humans. This is expensive, and it’s an expense Facebook can avoid if it can suppress information about its failures to block paid political disinformation. It’s cheaper to silence critics than it is to address their criticism.
I don’t think Google gives a shit about the $10m it gets from predatory fake abortion clinics. But I think the company believes that the PR trouble it would get into for blocking them — and the expense it would incur in trying to catch and block fake abortion clinic ads — are real liabilities. In other words, it’s not about the $10m it would lose by blocking the ads — Google wants to avoid the political heat it would take from forced birth fanatics and cost of the human reviewers who would have to double-check rejected ads.
In other words, Google doesn’t abet fraudulent abortion clinics because they share the depraved sadism of the people who run these clinics. Rather, Google teams up with these sadists out of cowardice and greed.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers
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[Image ID: A ruined streetscene. Atop a pile of rubble sits a dilapidated shack. In front of the shack is a letterboard with the word ABORTIONS set off-center and crooked. In the foreground is a carny barker at a podium, gesturing at the sign and the shack. The barker's head and face have been replaced with the Google logo. Within the barker's podium is a heap of US$100 bills.]
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Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
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agenciaefesios · 13 days
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muktadirbddm · 2 months
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This is Muktadir I am a Digital Marketer and SEO Expert. 🌏 Our Services 🌐Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ⭐Google ads & ✨Facebook ads 🌟Youtube Promotion 🌍Social Media Marketing
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